Why is Your Immune System Failing You? | Dr. Sally LaMont

Welcome everyone, to the Women to Women series and podcast that I'm just beginning now. And I'm so excited today to have a new guest, and it's Dr. Sally Lamont. I've kind of watched her material over the years, and I'm just delighted to have a conversation with her today. Let me tell you a little bit about Sally. She's a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist in San Francisco, and she's been involved in functional medicine, which is, as you know, something that I adore and I practice myself since its start. She brings decades of experience in the clinic and the kitchen. And today's podcast as well, Dr. Sally will be talking about her upcoming program and why great flavor and nutrition are actually the entry point to immunity. And it's something I talk about all the time because food is the most powerful drug we have. So I'm really excited to be kind of digging a little deeper into that. And I want you to really take out your notebook and your pen and paper so you can take notes because sometimes the information is overwhelming, but you can get little tidbits. From today, I think that will be really helpful for you as well. And Dr. Sally is going to be talking a little bit about her program at the end of the podcast today. So let's dig in. Thank you so much, Sally, for coming on board.

My pleasure.

And we will dig right in. So we are talking so many times now about immunity. And because of the whole issue around the pandemic, I think it's really important for us to kind of really understand. Let's dig a little deeper into whole notion. And what do you think is underneath so many people's compromised immune systems that we see today? And the thing that I really want to talk about is what can people do about it?

Oh, we will talk about that.

Yes, we will.

And you know, to answer your really great question, I think that what is behind so much of America's compromised immunity is the way we eat and live. Over the last 50 years, the rates of chronic diseases have been rising all over the world, and America has led the way. Chronic conditions like high blood pressure and high blood sugar and obesity and high cholesterol and high triglycerides, these things that so many people have, they actually increase our risk of infection and lead to heart disease and stroke and diabetes and cancer. So these are the pre existing conditions that predispose to the worst outcomes of COVID 19. And they tend to cluster together in a condition called metabolic syndrome, where they happen all at the same Time and about a third of Americans and a quarter of the world have these co mingling conditions. And it just creates a state of chronic inflammation that impairs our immune response and predisposes us to the 560,000 people who have died of COVID so far during the pandemic.

Sally, what can people do? I mean, we talk a lot. I always talk about food as medicine, and the most powerful drug we have is the food that we're putting into our bodies. But how do we help people understand? How do they begin to make some of those nutritional changes that are truly the engine of their health?

Another good question. I think it really begins by eating a whole foods, plant based diet. That doesn't mean it doesn't include some flesh protein, because we have varying needs for that. But our plates need to be filled with a colorful array of vegetables, fruits and nuts and seeds and legumes, some whole intact grains, because these foods all contain. It's actually the pigments that make blueberries blue and strawberries red and tomatoes red and cabbage purple. Those pigments contain compounds called phytochemicals that speak to our genes that instruct our immune system how to function properly. So getting a plate full of veggies really provides the foundational compounds upon which our body is built. So I would say let's start right there.

So let's backtrack a moment. You mentioned the whole notion of genetics, and I think what happens to a lot of people, they say, look, it's just in my genes. And one of the things I think people need to understand is that you can have genes and we all do, but it can actually impact our genes if we change our diet and if we change our environment, called epigenetics and nutrigenomics. Can you speak to that a little bit more? Because I think people get very confused and think, well, you know, I've got a family history of diabetes, or I have a family history of high blood pressure or heart disease. You know, it's inevitable.

That's certainly the way we were trained. And it is misinformation. You know, we have the power to change our destiny by exactly what you said, by extreme exposing our genes to a new environment. When we eat the way we were taught to eat, it's refined and processed foods. And that's what our parents and grandparents ate. That's about when our diets began to change over this last hundred years into the highly refined and processed foods that have bred this chronic disease epidemic. But that can be unwound. We can reverse Actual pre, you know, if you've got diabetes, if you have heart disease, these things don't just need to continue. They can be reversed by changing the environment in which those genes are living. And so that means moving away from white bread towards a real, true whole grain that has the essential nutrients that includes not just some kind of an orange flavored drink, but a true piece of citrus that's teeming with, with the vitamins, the minerals and those phytochemicals that teach our genes how to function properly. So I think we hold the power to reverse this chronic disease epidemic through the way we eat and live.

So I have a weight loss program that I use and in the weight loss program I'm looking at people's cholesterol levels and it's not unusual for my patients. I have somebody in particular who lost £20, which is really, I mean, it's a lot, but it's not that much. And her cholesterol went from being too high at 249 to 199. But most importantly, her triglycerides went from 312 to 104 in 12 weeks. So it is. Well, actually it was less than that was about eight weeks. But the bottom line is that we really can change our biochemistry from exactly what you're saying, which is to have color on our plate and to enjoy it. Here's the next question. A lot of people think that if I'm going to eat this way, it's boring and it doesn't taste very good and the other food is so flavorful. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Because so many people have this myth that it just, you know, kind of tastes not so great.

Boy, that's such an interesting thing. You know, I think our taste buds get trained early on to kind of experience brash flavors, amped up flavors that have been created by, by the fast food industry to be addicting. And so when you first taste something like broccoli or asparagus or a whole grain, your palate isn't met with those flavors. And it may seem unfamiliar at first, but one of my favorite ways to wake up food and to bring it alive is to incorporate herbs and spices. They're in a lot of those refined, unprocessed foods, but not in their natural form. So bringing in something like a chimichurri sauce, which is a simple and easy thing to make. It's a combination of parsley and some oregano and cilantro ground into a paste. And it's like a Pesto, and it's actually an Argentinian steak, but you can put that on a sweet potato or an egg or a piece of fish, and it just totally wakes it up. And I challenge anybody that thinks that natural foods are boring to just start to play with herbs and spices. I've actually just created a new document that I will share with all of your readers who come over to my website. I call it Flav Bombs. And I put in a bunch of great recipes, including that chimichurri recipe, and listed a whole set of herbs and spices so that you can kind of get to know the flavors and the uses and, you know, the way that you can bring them into your diet.

And what is that website and how do they get that?

Dr. Sally's Kitchen. Dr. Sally's. No apostrophe because you can't do that. Kitchen.com. and so there it is.

I have to check it out as well. That sounds great.

Yes.

So let's talk a little bit more about inflammation. You know, we talk a lot about, you know, how we have an inflamed society. What are some of, let me think, three tips that would be really helpful if you have inflammation, as one is your problems.

Well, let's see. First, I would think of incorporating herbs and spices, and specifically, one that you may know about but might not really use is turmeric. Now, turmeric is that root. It's a cousin of ginger, and it's what makes curry yellowish orange. And it's actually what makes mustard that color mustard looks and tastes the way it does because of turmeric. Turmeric has in it curcumin, a compound that is the most potent natural anti inflammatory that we've discovered yet in nature. So bringing in spices like turmeric and ginger into the diet are a really great way to shift things. The most important, I think, is getting off of the blood. I call it the blood sugar rollercoaster. That get up in the morning and have something sweet, and the blood sugar climbs. And in a couple of hours, there's not a lot of fiber or nutrients in so many of the pastries, maybe, that people have for breakfast, that their blood sugar plummets. And with it, they feel exhausted and hangry and ready for another hit of sugar. That constant up and down breeds what we call insulin resistance. It leads to diabetes and many other chronic degenerative diseases. So really, breaking that cycle of using sugar for energy is key. And I think a third tip for helping to really quell or quiet those fires of chronic inflammation in our body is to do what we call intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. Mainly that means not snacking late at night. Try to get your dinner done by like finished by six or seven so that you can take an extended period of time after dinner until maybe a late breakfast, something along the line of 12 to 14 or 16 hours where you're not just stuffing your face with all those late night snacks that we literally again were programmed and taught to eat as kids. We don't need them. They disrupt our body's natural healing cycle that occurs at night. One of the interesting things is that our pancreas, the organ that makes insulin to clear sugar out of the body, it has its own time clock and it actually begins to decline in its function around 8pm if at 10 o', clock, you're just deciding a bowl of ice cream would be the perfect way to get a good night's sleep, it's actually dead wrong because all that sugar ends up getting converted to fat, stored as fat, and it disrupts the gut and the immune system's regeneration that takes place at nighttime. So doing some time restricted eating, as I'm sure you know and you shared with your listeners a great way to promote weight loss and a great way to lower inflammation in the body.

Yeah, I mean, I use intermittent fasting and sometimes if people have very severe adrenal issues, I won't do the intermittent fasting, but instead what I'll have them do is keto, the same concept to get the blood sugar more stabilized. Yes. So let's talk about the immune system a little bit more and talk about the branches of the immune system. We've got the innate immune system and we've also got the adaptive immune system. Can you help the readers understand what, what's this all about?

Right, yeah. For many people they had maybe learned something about it back in high school, but with the pandemic and all the news being focused on how to think about our immune system, you may have heard these terms. The word innate means inborn and naturally occurring immune system. This is our white blood cells, neutrophils and lymphocytes and macrophages or things you might even see on a blood when you visit your doctor. We're born with these cells. They are in our body and they are fast responders, but they're not very specific. They're quick to get to a cut or to address an incoming virus in the lymph nodes. They are essential though, because what they do is educate the next phase of the immune system, called the adaptive Immune system. And it's learning from those white blood cells that you know to recognize, say, that spike protein on the coronavirus so that they can present that to the adaptive immune system. And this is where cells like the B cells are then able to make an antibody to greet that antigen. You could call the spike protein on the coronavirus an antigen. And a B cell makes an antibody that binds to that antigen, forming an antigen antibody complex that gets cleared out of the system. Having a vibrant and balanced innate immune system helps the slower but much more specific adaptive immune system come in and help the B cells make antibodies and the T cells send out a whole set of other regulatory cells to help the body fight off infection. And it's really a brilliant and beautiful system that's just in us and all we have to do is support it.

So if we had something that you would say would be the one thing that people can do to really enhance their health overall, Just kind of one piece that they can start with. Because I think sometimes people get overwhelmed and you say to them, you know, just do a whole food stat. And they are like, I don't even know where to start. I don't even know where to begin. You know, help me. What's the one thing that you think will kind of change the needle initially?

Well, I'm, I think learning to prep some simple foods, learning to cook. Otherwise, we're really at the effect of the restaurant industry or whoever's feeding us. Developing the simple skills to create a meal, I think is honestly one of the most powerful things that we can do. But backing up from there is to peel an orange, to sit down and make sure you eat a piece of fruit every day, and that you start to get at least five servings of vegetables and fruits each day. Only 10% of Americans get that. USDA recommended five servings of vegetables and fruits a day. And when we don't have that platform in place, then our bodies, honestly, they do not function right. It's like putting the wrong fuel in your car. It's going to sputter and break down. And that's exactly what we're doing when we feed ourselves all this other not real food. So I think.

Giving yourself the opportunity to experience fresh vegetables and fruits in a simple, clean form is the basics, and then getting some simple cooking chops developed. And that's actually what I teach people to do. And we'll talk about that in a little while.

So one of the things that I hear from people all the time is I don't have the time. I Don't have the time to cook, and I have the time to prepare things, and, you know, it's really hard. And I think your notion of preparation, you know, I. A lot of times will say, people just take an hour or two on the weekend and just to cut up your vegetables or do some of these basics so that you have things that you can kind of quickly prepare for yourself if you're too busy, especially moms when they have little kids. Anything else and using spices and learning how to do that, and it doesn't have to be complicated. You can have very simple meals that are delicious and full of color. You know, even making a salad with some blueberries and putting in some fennel. Those are just kind of fabulous little things you can just chop up very quickly and it doesn't take long to do. Yeah.

Toast some nuts so you have those ready as a snack or to put onto a salad. I love your idea of, on the weekends, make a pot of soup. Dr. Salley's kitchen is full of soup recipes because they can be frozen, kept in your freezer. When you come home, feeling that sore throat or like, you know, you're just off, it's so wonderful to be able to reach into the freezer and produce something that you've made for yourself. So thinking ahead and planning, I mean, these are learned skills, but they're what's missing from our society today.

Absolutely. No, I think we've kind of lost that. I grew up with a European mom, and we never, ever bought processed things, ever, ever, ever. She made everything from scratch and always did. So I didn't grow up that way.

Well, Marcel, you're lucky that you grew up with a European mother who had those cooking chops. I did not. I grew up in Kansas, and my mom was not a good cook, God bless her. So I had to learn. And, I mean, I grew up eating Spam sandwiches on Wonder Bread, and it was bad. So by high school, I was going to the library and pulling cookbooks off the shelf and sitting down and trying to figure out what could I feed myself that actually was delicious? And I got into, you know, looking at international cookbooks.

Sure.

Yeah. Because it's so much more fun to bring in the flavors of different cultures around the world. And I've been doing it for decades now. But I tell you that story so you realize you can start wherever you are. And it is. It's the most wonderful skill set to develop. Plus, you get to entertain your friends and feed your family and watch your health grow.

I always use the Analogy of the car. If you put in the right kind of gas, all the mechanics will tell you, you take care of it, it'll work. Well. I was at one of the regular places to spill up gas, a fast convenience store. And I put the gas in my car and I was driving down the road and it was shaking so hard I couldn't hold the steering wheel. And many weeks later we found out that there was paint thinner in the tank. And my car $10,000 later needed much of the engine replaced. And that was just a car. So what we don't think about is when we have that experience in our body, it takes years for it to happen. But it's the same notion, only my car responded a little faster and had to be repaired badly. But it's that piece which is you got to really be mindful of what you put in your body. If it's foreign, it doesn't necessarily know what to do with it and it may not occur until be a problem later. So it's kind of an interesting analogy.

I think it's a great analogy.

You can use it anytime you want.

Paint thinner, gums up the works.

Yeah, you're not kidding. $10,000 worth.

It's okay. I mean it was a great. Now I can use the metaphor anytime. So Sally, tell us a little bit about your program because people would be interested and perhaps you can type it into the chat in terms of how they can get a hold of the information as well.

Yes, actually if you go to Dr. Sally's kitchen and subscribe then I'll be able to share with you as I have two programs that are going to be launching again in the next several weeks. One is spring clean your body. It's my annual spring cleanse. It's a fun and fast paced kind of food. First program and I do a 21 day challenge to help people learn to eat clean, to get off that blood sugar roller coaster, peel off some of those unhealthy foods from their diet. Because I love to cook, I've created a set of cooking videos with recipes and shows, shopping lists to introduce you. You mentioned fennel. That is a fabulous Italian. It's not quite a root because part of it does grow above ground. But that's a fabulous vegetable and it's so good for women because it contains some natural phyto or plant estrogens. I've made a little video about fennel and show you how to use it and put it in a spring salad. So.

I love doing this course because it will.

Help you learn to prep simple foods that are clean, delicious. I've gotten great feedback from people who really weren't comfortable in the kitchen. But when they see me sharing my favorite kitchen tools and my must have kitchen ingredients in this spring clean your body course, they are starting to learn how to develop those skills themselves. And then I have another one called the healthy immune reset. And this one is a five week online course that will just really dive deeper into the power of the immune system. And it focuses on, session by session, the right foods, the right nutrients, the right lifestyle shift that can reverse this chronic disease epidemic that we've been talking about and empower the immune system to function optimally. This isn't the last pandemic we're going to deal with, unfortunately. So I think it's the perfect time to learn more about how your body works and how to support it. Both of these classes have have been designed with that in mind.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Sally, for taking the time out today. And I hope that people will go to your website and indeed learn more, because cooking and food is the most powerful, powerful intervention you can make for your health.

I couldn't agree more. And thank you for having me. Marcel, it's a pleasure.

You as well. Take care.

All right. Bye.

Sam.